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/ 6 December 2007
About R100-million-worth of counterfeit cigarettes were seized by police and port security at the Durban harbour on Thursday. Head of Durban harbour security and protection services Superintendent Thembakazi Mase said about 4 400 boxes of Chelsea cigarettes were found in four containers and 2 100 boxes of Chicago cigarettes were found in two other containers.
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/ 6 December 2007
Medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières said this week that Angolan soldiers have raped, beaten and tortured illegal Congolese migrant workers before deporting them across the border. The French humanitarian group said the rights abuses were occurring in the diamond-rich northern Angolan province of Luanda Norte.
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/ 6 December 2007
A miner was killed on Thursday when a rock fell on him at Kloof gold mine near Westonaria, Gold Fields spokesperson Andrew Davidson said. ”The accident, the result of a rockfall, occurred in a stope at number three shaft 2 936m below ground at 11am,” said Davidson. Another miner who was working in the stope was injured during the rockfall.
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/ 6 December 2007
A new strain of the deadly Ebola virus is thought to have infected 93 people and killed at least 22 in Uganda, including a doctor and three other medical staff looking after patients, a health official said on Thursday. Dr Sam Zaramba, the government’s director of health services, said the doctor had died after looking after a patient in an isolation ward.
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/ 6 December 2007
South African Reserve Bank Governor Tito Mboweni on Thursday raised the repo rate by 50 basis points following a two-day meeting of the bank’s monetary policy committee. The increase pushes the repo rate to 11%, the prime overdraft rate to 14,5% and the tightening cycle that began in June last year to 400 basis points.
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/ 6 December 2007
President Thabo Mbeki took issue with the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) report on South Africa, which suggested that there was an unacceptably high level of violent crime in the country. This emerged when the APRM report was unceremoniously released as part of a post-Cabinet media briefing at the Union Buildings on Thursday.
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/ 6 December 2007
An overstretched judiciary is hampering attempts to prosecute those responsible for mining accidents, South Africa’s minerals and energy minister said on Thursday. Mining companies in South Africa, the world’s top source of platinum and gold, are under pressure to improve safety at mines, where about 200 workers have been killed this year.
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/ 6 December 2007
Three people were killed and the N3 to Durban was closed on Thursday morning after a truck veered into another lane, leading to a massive pile-up, a KwaZulu-Natal transport department spokesperson said. Zinhle Mngomezulu said a truck travelling to Johannesburg left its lane at about 6am and ended up facing the traffic that was heading to Durban.
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/ 6 December 2007
In Texas, amorous couples get engaged in Loving — and then go to Looneyville via Hoop and Holler. Earth is also in Texas, and lies about 2 400km away from Mars and Venus, both in Pennsylvania. And the good people of Rising Sun, Maryland, probably have close ties to their kinfolk in Hot Coffee, Mississippi, Toast in North Carolina and Two Egg, Florida.
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/ 6 December 2007
The cost of adopting responsible policies on climate change for global economies could be balanced by the creation of millions of "green jobs," the United Nations said on Thursday. In a statement, UN Environment Programme chief Achim Steiner called for a major boost to so-called clean industries.